Locale bringup and barriers for entry

[Marcel Schneider via CLDR-Users]

On 22/09/18 21:54 Philippe Verdy wrote:
>
> My intent is to have those tags (that are internally numbered with a stable id but may be renamed by proposing users,
> or by admins if tags are made global and unprefixed) also usable in Survey discussions to attach a comment to all
> CLDR data entries using that have been tagged with it by the user (using a prefixed user tag) or by a global tag
> (created by the CLDR tech admins).

Now I understand and believe it's very useful to prevent what we often observed or did, when vetters come up with a 
whole bunch of items having same issue, and cannot help posting one forum post per item, as there is no other way 
of getting the stuff show up in the information pane when one of these items has focus in SurveyTool. So we happened 
to copy-paste one single message and paste it as many times in the launch-new-thread form as there were items to fix. 
Downstream that triggers of course an avalanche of e-mail alerts from ST, which every vetter would then have to open
one by one, only to read the same message x times. Therefore yes we should really have means of bundling items and 
discuss them together as a batch.

However the issue lies in the process. As long as we vote items one by one in ST instead of preparing our votes in 
LDML format, we will stick with ST features that may or may not be present. And ST is far too less agile, since even
when a patch is available, it isn’t applied until next ST overhaul prior to next vetting round, so that ST keeps 
tampering with peoples’ work instead of being fixed over night, to see how it looks next day. CLDR should adapt to 
contributors’ way of working, not impose their own rythm, because contributors may have other constraints and limited 
time. 

A pity that the Trac tool is not used enough. Perhaps vetters are not allowed to spend time writing or commenting 
bug reports, or are disallowed to post publicly, given Trac has unrestrained public access, whereas ST fora are 
closed up and can only be checked by people having credentials, so that locale data production is opaque and at 
the antipodes of what is current practice in open source projects. 
There are also technical issues with interoperability of SurveyTool and Trac. While links in Trac work fine, Trac 
refuses to publish more than five external links at once, which heavily impacts usability, given ST fora are 
AFAIK considered external by Trac spam bots.
What bothered me badly is that anchors on ST fora pages don’t work precisely. Instead of scrolling where you copied 
an anchor link, ST forum scrolls elsewhere, so that I ended up always adding the datestamp for use in browser search.
Well that should make for another bug ticket, but I currently cannot do. I hope TC monitoring this list will wish 
to pick this up for fixing.

> I.e. reproduce what we can do easily in GutHub to track various related bugs reports and RFEs or pending actions.
> Ideally there should also be a graph of entries (these tags are working also like tasks in task lists, they have a status
> coming from the posted comments, which can be closed once solved)
> May be some integration with GitHub and community development tools or bug tracking tools would be useful,
> just like many opensource develomment projects (of which CLDR is one).
> That integration comes with URNs/URLs linked to CLDR data paths.
> For now CLDR submission is too much hierarchic, and does not focus very well on related groups of items
> that must be fixed together (in the same locale, or across locales), so it is very difficult to isolate the inconsistencies
> (and get reliable votes to fix them in the short time allowed for submission and vetting (notably because the tool is
> much too slow and uses really too much java-script/DOM resources in the browser, and is very unresponsive to user events,
> creating many unexpected actions, or ignored clicks).

Yes indeed. People of different locales cannot interoperate well, and even between sublocales and root locales there 
is unresponsiveness. See how one French sublocale did not update the group separator. That is symptomatic of missing 
dynamics inside the CLDR community. Then also we do indeed loose time when slowed down, and an "Approve all" button 
ɩs also missing, for use where most items are OK and only few or none to change votes after. This one has been posted:
https://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/11250#comment:1

For now I can only suggest to work offline and be ready to organize ourselves. I think that if being able to 
intersperse CLDR work sequenes all over the year, as suggested with the bulk upload feature of CLDR we can prepare 
and make up our minds so that we’re ready for the short windows of opportunity we may then use to efficiently discuss 
and share LDML data for everybody to upload his or her votes.


Regards,

Marcel